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World Order: Power vs Legitimacy
Only power: turns every disagreement into a test of strength
Only moral proscriptions: tends toward either crusades or and impotent policy tempting challenges

Find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot based on consensus.
The development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.

The truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

Has it come to this, that the leaders of thought who have given religions and all kinds of things to the world have to tag on to this kind of group or that and be hangers-on of this party or the other carrying out their wishes and occasionally giving an idea?

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds: this one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he’d get better if he was by the window.

We are all capable of hurting others.
The line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.

My ego can handle that.

Diplomacy cannot be divorced from the realities of force and power. But diplomacy should be divorced from a moralistic and meddlesome concern with the internal policies of other nations. Stability is the prime goal of diplomacy. It is served when nations accept the legitimacy of the existing world order and when they act based on their national interests; it is threatened when nations embark on ideological or moral crusades.

During my session this art of relaxation itself became the basis of an immense revelation, as it suddenly appeared to me that something in the spirit of this relaxation, something in the achievement of a perfect, trusting and loving openness of spirit, is the very essence and purpose of life. Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectation, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.

For well or ill, reality or folly, humans have a tendency to worship.

Và nếu trường thi có đưa ra một đề tài lịch sử, thì vẫn là một tiểu luận về các triều đại xa xưa của thời Thượng cổ bên Trung Quốc được xem như thời hoàng kim của nhân loại.

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
5. Could I put it more shortly?
6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling.

The best present you can give your children is to love their mother. I believe all children need that confidence, that stability, that sense of confidence from knowing that we have a stable family, that daddy and mummy are in a loving, stable, committed relationship.

When I think of competition it’s like I try to create against the past. I think about Michaelangelo, Picasso, the pyramids. That’s the reason why I put 5,000 hours into a song like “Power”.

The idea of the end of a thing as inscribing the final meaning of any experience is one of the lies agreed upon that we use to organize our lives. The truth is, all we get is a day and a time. And more than that, as an artist in this medium, you have to assume that every episode, in some way or another, is the end of things, and that the audience gets a sense of an ending. And then the miracle is that life goes on. Well, and then one day the miracles stop. The biggest lie is the idea that we are entitled to a meaningful and coherent summarizing, a conclusion, of something which never concludes. And in that regard - this is the lie I’m telling myself so I don’t set fire to anything - I don’t regret anything.

At its best, education widens our empathy, enabling us to put ourselves in the place of others. But in practice it often does the opposite, distancing the successful from the anxieties of ordinary communities. Armed with the confidence of meritocratic superiority, the vanguard readily saw themselves as the new Platonic Guardians, entitled to override the values of others.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

It’s perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everyone wants peace. The question is, On what terms?

Kim Dung cũng nhấn mạnh, đối với ông võ công cũng chỉ là một thứ mà giúp người tập luyện mang được trong người một bản lĩnh đủ để chống chọi với đời, để hành hiệp trượng nghĩa, chứ không sử dụng nó để so tài cao thấp.

Men need to find ways to show they care while women need to find ways to show they trust.

They’re great players, they deserve the recognition, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t piss me off. It may sound arrogant, but I’m confident that I’m really good. If I’m losing to players that I know aren’t on my level, I’ll get angry. The last two games of that series, you saw how I play when I’m angry.

The millions who see themselves deprived of security and well-being become desperate. The realization that they have lost all or most all of what they had set aside for a rainy day radicalizes their entire outlook. They tend to fall easy prey to adventurers aiming at dictatorship, and to charlatans offering patent-medicine solutions. The sight of some people profiteering while the rest suffer infuriates them. The effect of such an experience is especially strong among the youth. They learn to live in the present and scorn those who try to teach them “old-fashioned” morality and thrift.

Đến tuổi này lâu lâu cũng có cảm giác hơi buồn buồn về đời sống. Mình hiểu là có những cái mình muốn trải qua, mình luôn nghĩ mình còn thì giờ, nhưng thật ra nó đã qua rồi, nó không bao giờ trở lại nữa.

Tôi đã khóc từ đầu đến cuối khi đọc cuốn này. Tiểu thuyết gợi cho tôi một thứ ngôn ngữ điện ảnh mới, rất khó, là một thử thách rất khủng khiếp. Những gì mình đã học được từ những phim trước đó không thể áp dụng được với phim này. Chính vì thế tôi càng muốn làm. Với tôi, quốc tịch phim không quan trọng, quan trọng là ngôn ngữ điện ảnh. Điện ảnh là một quốc tịch riêng, mình phải học ngôn ngữ đó để nói một cách tinh tế và hay.

Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all.
Which is?
It’s not about you.

The best use of imagination is creativity, the worst use of imagination is anxiety.

Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. Wisdom acquisition is a moral duty. As a corollary to that proposition which is very important, it means that you are hooked for lifetime learning. And without lifetime learning, you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you learn after you leave here.

The best way to become likable is to make a list of three to four characteristics that you like in people you like. Adopt these characteristics. And, make a list of three to four characteristics that you dislike in people you don’t like. Get rid of those characteristics.

The safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want.

What’s the best way to get a good spouse? The best single way is to deserve a good spouse because a good spouse is by definition not nuts.

If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That’s hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good thing.

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

Patience combined with opportunity is a great thing to have. My grandfather taught me that opportunity is infrequent and one has to be ready when it strikes. That’s what Berkshire is. It’s amazing how fast Berkshire acts when we find opportunity. You can’t be timid - and that applies to all of life. You can’t be timid in marriage when you find the right spouse. It might be your only opportunity to be happy in life. Too many people don’t act when they should. That’s why half of all marriages don’t work out.

Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing the completion of knowing.

Our feelings (anger, shame, delight) appear almost instantly, and, left alone, they don’t last very long.
But if we invent a narrative around an event or a person, we can keep the feeling going for a very long time.

Price is the last refuge for the businessperson without the imagination, heart and soul to dig a bit deeper.

You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.

If a fair fight in a battle came round, someone messed up in planning.

For 150 years, Europe’s great powers had fought over trade and colonies so they could make money to fund their wars at home. Britain had done better than anyone at this, becoming, one writer claimed in 1718, “the most considerable of any nation in the world [because of] the vastness and expansiveness of our trade.” Yet if this were true, some Britons asked, did it not imply that conventional wisdom was wrong? Instead of trade in India being a means, contributing to the end of winning wars in Europe, perhaps wars in Europe should be the means, and winning more trade in India should be the end. Really profound shifts in strategic thinking typically only come along every century or two, but one was now under way in London. Amid intense debate, a loose alliance of commercial interests dragged Britain in fits and starts toward a new business model, in which fighting in Europe was solely a way to distract France so that Britain could snap up its colonies and trade without interference.

Chiều hôm ấy, thật kỳ lạ, kỷ niệm về Đồi Mơ, về mối tình vô danh đêm ven đồi năm nào trỗi dậy trên đường xa đã đồng thời làm tỉnh lại trong anh ý thức về một thiên mệnh đầy thôi thúc. Thôi thúc một cách tha thiết và u buồn. Đời anh rộng mở: hãy đi và hãy sống… Đấy, cần phải viết về chiến tranh trong niềm thôi thúc ấy, viết sao cho xao xuyến nổi lòng dạ, xúc động nổi trái tim con người như thể viết về tình yêu, về nỗi buồn, sao cho có thể truyền được vào cuộc sống đương thời luồng điện của những cảm xúc chỉ có thể diễn đạt bằng thì quá khứ và quá khứ của quá khứ.

This is the best reason to learn history, not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Underneath everything in your life, there is that thing, that empty - forever empty. You know what I’m talking about? That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there. And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes.’ It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it… Anyway, I started to get that sad feeling I was reaching for the phone then I said, you know what, don’t. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it and let it hit you like a truck. And I let it come, and I started to feel, Oh my God! And I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments. And then I had happy feelings ‘cause when you let yourself feel sad, your body has like antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip. The thing is because we don’t want that bit of sad, we push it away with like a little phone or jack off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy.

Of course, China will innovate in its own way, but there is something about the ecosystem of America that has all the things that we all know. Also, I think most importantly, Americans have the ability to question hierarchy, which is absolutely key. I hear people talking about Asian education and the Tiger Mom style of parenting. You know, I went through an Asian education system. I think it’s pretty lousy. It’s rote memorization toward some big exam, and when you’ve taken the exam you promptly forget everything you’ve learned.
The American system is much better in that it teaches students to think, it teaches students to problem-solve, it teaches students to love learning for the rest of their lives, it is a continuous process, and it doesn’t make anyone feel ashamed of failure. The ability to fail efficiently is an incredibly powerful part of innovation. So China will innovate, but I think that is something very special about the United States.

Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.

The only thing that you really have in your life is time. And if you invest that time in yourself to have experiences that enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe.” I tell my students that they should not rush and should prepare. What should they prepare for? The foundational skills. With the advancement in technology, many of us can now cover our weakness using digital tools. But that’s like building a sand castle. You might reach a certain height, but you will not be able to go beyond that. I wish for the students to build up on their traditional skills and reserve on using digital tools the younger they are. And I emphasize that studying the subject matter while understanding them accurately is more important than just drawing a lot.

What we get from technology tends to be a matter of expectations, not patience. So we should expect more of the web. Because when we do, we necessarily expect more of ourselves. And when we expect more of ourselves, we expand possibilities of everyone. Let’s not settle for less.

Early Americans, we should emphasize, were neither smarter nor more hardworking than those who toiled century after century before them. But those venturesome pioneers crafted a system that unleashed human potential, and their successors built upon it.

The separation of concerns. This is what I mean by “focusing one’s attention upon some aspect”: it does not mean ignoring the other aspects, it is just doing justice to the fact that from this aspect’s point of view, the other is irrelevant. It is being one - and multiple-track minded simultaneously.

You’re looking for FWB, but investing all of your efforts in the B part and none in the F part. You meet a girl, she comes over to yours or vice versa, you chat and watch movies, you have sex, rinse repeat. Is this behavior that you’d do with any of your male friends? (Minus the sex part) I’d get bored of anyone who just comes over to watch tv and chat. You know what makes common interests awesome? They are things you can go do/experience together. If sex feels empty to you after a few times, then next time you meet a girl you’re genuinely interested in, wait to have sex. Develop the Friends part before you start the Benefits part.

It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire inspired Sir Wren to design his symphonies in stone. This desire made Rockefeller amass millions that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest family in your town build a house far too large for its requirements. This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children.

God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question:
Am I being productive or just active?
Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
I don’t much care where
Then it doesn’t matter which way you go

There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

There is a large and vocal school of thought in the world of food and gastronomy that celebrates tradition. People who advocate this point of view seek out the authentic and original aspects of cuisine, placing in high esteem food experiences that conform to traditional styles and values. This group’s motto might be, “Old ways are best.” People in this camp are generally more interested in a recipe from Grandma’s farmhouse than they are in a contemporary chef’s latest creations.
This view is possible, however, only if you shut your eyes to history. What we call “traditional” cuisine is a convenient fiction. Culinary practices have been changing constantly throughout history. Investigate a “traditional” food closely enough, and you’ll find that it was new at some point, perhaps not even all that long ago. Tradition, at least in the food world, is the accumulated leftovers from changes wrought in the past.

LoL is not mass market. LoL is one massive niche.

Rather than sketching away until things take shape, train your brain to create the image in your mind first. This involves sort of tuning out of reality and placing your attention in your visual imagination.

Aristotle was one of the smartest people of his time, but he was wrong about so much, because a smart person can connect the dots they see in a million ways that aren’t correct when they don’t have all the dots.

What people don’t get is that a world leader is a label that is earned. Not awarded. The country that earns it shows that it can consistently take on the responsibility of looking after the benefit of other countries, not just its own.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power in the sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Like energy, power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, influence on opinion. No one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no form from which the other are derivable.

I think the number one thing to remember is that your music is not you. From what I’ve noticed, myself and others included, people get musically closed minded because the type of music they like is part of who they are.
Oddly enough, women don’t seem to be as effected by this as men do. Most women I know like a little bit of everything.

Trust is a greater sign of caring than love.

The difference between who you are now and who you were five years ago is largely due to how you’ve spent your time along the way. The habits we groove become who we are, one minute at a time. A small thing, repeated, is not a small thing.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know use very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?” Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work or enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

There’s really no end to the amount of detail you can include. I don’t use a computer and I don’t think I ever will. I draw with a pencil initially and then I work on top of that with ink. I always put figures in. As an illustrator you quickly catch on to the fact that nobody’s going to look at it if there’s no human interest. When you start including figures, you can begin to create a sense of atmosphere. You can show how people relate to a space and you can explore the realities and practicalities of the place, how people lived, how they adapted to their surrounding, how they slept, how they ate.

One of the touchiest and most personal issues concerned letting success go to our heads. We all got caught up in how good we were doing. Over time an attitude of invincibility set in. With success comes a responsibility to behave appropriately - the game industry is a small and incestuous one, and nothing lasts forever. Behaving in an exemplary manner and being friends with the industry at large is far more important than chest-beating about our current success.

Bach, he notes, had to live for forty-two years before he could begin writing it, and he drew on two thousand years of Christianity - indeed, on all of human culture. The subsystems of his mind had been evolving for even longer; creating Homo Sapiens, required billions of years of irreplaceable design work.

He regards the zombie problem as a typically philosophical waste of time. The problem presupposes that consciousness is like a light switch: either an animal has a self or it doesn’t. But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. He loves the phrase “sort of.” Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that “sort of” know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people - in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture - but this doesn’t make them zombies. It just means that they “sort of” have consciousness, as measured by human standards.

He insisted that my mother serve meat or fish at every meal - never chicken, which he associated with the impoverished old days. After my other died and he was living alone, there was no one to cook on his caretaker’s day off. (He never entered the kitchen himself, except to ask how long until dinner.) No matter how many times I suggested that he order takeout, the answer was always the same: “Forget it - the neighbors would see. Getting food delivered is for people who can’t afford to go to a restaurant.”

Toward the end, all of the entries were about how lonely she was, how she only got to see her grand children twice a year, and how her own children never saw her unless they needed something.

One day we were watching tv together and she just started crying and I asked what was up and she just looked at me and said “all my friends are dead.”

It’s all never ending, try to enjoy what you think you dislike now because you will surely miss it all once it’s over.
I really think you need to be a grand parent to get the most enjoyment out of kids.

I created “busy” to avoid the thoughtful, strategic work that required more of me. There’s a word for this: busywork. I was busy with busywork. What an ironic thing to boast about!

Kẻ trú non cao nhìn gió thẳm. Người xuôi sông lớn mộng kinh kỳ.

Practice as much as you feel you can accomplish with concentration. Once when i became concerned because others around me practiced all day long, I asked my professor how many hours I should practice, and he said, “It really doesn’t matter how long. If you practice with your fingers, no amount is enough. If you practice with your head, two hours is plenty.”

The more you know what you really want, and where you’re going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, that’s when the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to bloom large and become very threatening.

Every billionaire suffers from he same problem. Nobody around them ever says, “Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid”

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found out that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys and girls.

Designing for the web is like visualizing a tesseract. We build experiences by manipulating their shadows.

When you’re showing off, the only thing that matters is the screenshot. Make it 100% beautiful. Don’t, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don’t think that they’re looking at the functionality. They’re not. They want to see pretty pixels.

Give them several versions of the graphic design to choose from. Let them feel important by giving them non-crucial lipstick-on-a-chicken stuff to muck around with. A good interior decorator is constantly bringing their client swatches and samples and stuff to choose from. But they would never discuss dishwasher placement with the client. There’s no sense wasting time arguing about where the dishwasher goes, it has to go next to the sink, don’t even bring it up; let the clients get the design kicks doing something harmless.

Winning is better than losing, but everyone loses when the war isn’t one worth fighting.

I just draw everyday. I’ve drawn everyday since I was a little kid. If you drew everyday for fifteen years, you would be good at it too. Anyone would.

Power. Hope. Peace. Dreams. Sell one today.

Find the things that won’t change in your business and invest heavily in those things.

In fact, I think it’s disingenuous for really successful people to put so much of the focus on love, just as it’s disingenuous for really reach people to say money doesn’t matter. People tend to romanticize their own motivations and histories. They value what matter to them now, and forget what really mattered to them when they started.

I’m not happy because our definition of happy isn’t very good. It’s a monochromatic word used to describe a rich, painful spectrum of human feeling.

Because humans are renowned for the imperviousness to logic (just look at basically any political discussion, if you need proof). If you want to change minds and convince people to follow you, you’re going to need to appeal to emotion.

People can spend way too much time and energy learning and trying out new tech that they miss out on the opportunity of staying long enough with a technology to learn from experience. In other words, today we spend way too much time on accidental complexity than on essential complexity.

The last systems principle we look at is one I find particularly poignant: almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

Every time you write code or introduce third-party services, you are introducing the possibility of failure into your system.

One of the big reasons for that upward spike in humanity on the line graph is we started to figure out how to get the most out of humans. Progress came when we started pushing for things such as universal education and literacy, along with rights for minorities and women to pursue careers and advanced degrees.

No one wants to occupy the “last” place in society. No one wants to be the most despised. As long as racism remains intact, poor white people are guaranteed not to be the worst.

If they’re dying to know us, they’re not worth knowing. The only people worth our knowing are the people who don’t want to know us.

Leave people better than you found them.

Onscreen and off, the things that I do and learn inform everything else. The jigs I create woodworking teach me new ways to code. The time with my wife and dogs remind me of the reason we create anything at all.

First rule of leading a group of people is that you can’t let any of them think you’re their friend. As soon as they become your friend that breaches the boundary between teacher and student and their respect and admiration vanishes and they think of you as a friend giving them some advice. He demands no respect from his players because he doesn’t lead his players to believe that they should respect him.
I know in a lot of team based sports where the players are forced to eat with each other but never the coach because the coach doesn’t want the players to think he’s equal to them he never wants the players to feel as though they should feel anything less than that he knows everything.

Those who can believe that what happens on earth is but a brief prelude to an eternal existence will offset any tendency to envy with the thought that the success of others is a momentary phenomenon against a backdrop of an eternal life. But when a belief in an afterlife is dismissed as a childish and scientifically impossible opiate, the pressure to succeed and find fulfillment will inevitably be intensified by the awareness that one has only a single and frighteningly fleeting opportunity to do so. In such a context, earthly achievements can no longer be seen as an overture to what one may realize in another world; rather, they are the sum total of all that one will ever amount to.

Two maneuvers for raising our self-esteem. On the one hand, we may try to achieve more; and on the other, we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve. Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

True possession of a scene is a matter of making a conscious effort to notice elements and understand the construction. We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it.

Nature’s loveliness might in turn encourage us to locate the good in ourselves. Two people standing on the edge of a rock overlooking a stream and a grand wooded valley might thus transform their relationship not just with nature but also, and just as significantly, with each other.

The problem was not that the paintings themselves lied, but rather that the promised gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images that the Dutch artists had never painted. And that made the experience of traveling in the country seems strangely diluted compared with an afternoon spent in the Dutch galleries of the Lourve, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Messi is an unbelievable player, and maybe it pushes me more, harder to be better and better. But the people who know me, know I’m always like that, I try to be the best professional in my job, I try to be the best all the time. But sometimes it’s not possible because we are human beings, we are not machines. But in my mind I’m the best and I work like the best. This is the way I see myself till the end of my life, this is what I want and what I want to be.

I think I started having more success when I stopped feeling like there’s a narrative to my life. I think once you let go of that idea then first off, you stop seeing yourself like the most important thing in your narrative, you know. You see yourself more of a component. I don’t have, there’s no arc to my story, there’s no like climax or anticlimax. Once I let go of that, cos that was a big thing for me in high school and college, I think I started having more success and became happier.

Even if it’s true that the average man seems most comfortable with the commonplace and familiar, it is equally true that catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates that mediocrity and denies the reader one of the most easily accessible means for aesthetic development and eventual enjoyment.

Design cliches, meaningless patterns, stylish illustrations, and predetermined solutions are signs of such weakness. An understanding of the significance of modernism and familiarity with the history of design, painting, architecture, and other disciplines, which distinguish the educated designer and make his role more meaningful, are not every designer’s strong points.

In short, good ideas rarely come in bunches. The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out of prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear.

If I take small, thoughtful and measured steps, I think I might be able to stay small without being small - after all, the beauty of software is that it’s a massless and frictionless, it can act as an incredible idea multiplier. One person with taste, talent and an idea can change things.

It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with the problem longer.

Most superheroes are born with the powers or get them through an accident, while most supervillains gain their powers through intelligence or years of hard work.

You realize that most of the people that you meet are trying to get somewhere better. They’re trying to make more cash, get a little more respect, have more people admire them. It’s exhausting.

Bad experiences make great stories.

The people you meet will define an area as much as the things you see and do.

A person’s ability to engage in a genuine connection is inversely proportional to their need to prove themselves.

Never had luck. Never needed it.

Really, though, to be a mathematician is to experiment. Mathematical research is a fundamentally creative act. Lore has it that when David Hilbert, arguably the most influential mathematician of Europe, heard that a colleague had left to pursue fiction, he quipped: “He did not have enough imagination for mathematics.”

The point is, lifestyles are just like take-away Chinese vs dial-a-Pizza. They’re all the same. It makes no difference, because no matter where you are, on the inside you’re always the same person. Today was always going to be today, tomorrow is another today, and the good old days, will always be the good old days. So, just try to be happy, be thankful for what you have in your life, and be kind and generous.

A beautiful pair of shoes, but one size too small, on sale and everything… Not worth buying, not for you, not at any price. Because shoes that don’t fit aren’t a bargain.

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Name one genius that ain’t crazy.

When we realize that all our hopes and expectations of course can’t be fulfilled by that person, we continue to feel empty. You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.

If you believed what he believes, you’d do exactly what he’s doing.

There’s no better time than this very moment to be clear, to be honest and to have a difficult conversation.

Everything you can imagine is real.

In the US, we’re used to having prices set by some faceless corporation. In Vietnam, those prices are set by someone trying to carve out a living in a world that’s fundamentally unfair. And I think if our situations were reversed, and I was the one trying to get an extra few bucks off some (relative to me) very rich foreigner, then I’d do it in a heartbeat and not feel bad about it. My family’s needs outweigh the pride/inconvenience of a tourist who’s not gonna remember me at all in a week.

Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.

The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.

Trong từ điển của người Việt, người ta vẫn hay dùng những từ như là “mưu sinh”, “kiếm ăn”, “làm ăn” không mấy ai nói đến “sự nghiệp”. Có một “sự nghiệp” để đeo đuổi rồi thì mới co thêm một thứ gọi là “niềm kiêu hãnh”. Kiêu hãnh ở đây có thể hiểu là niềm tự hào về công việc mà mình theo đuổi, người ta tập trung vào cái mà mình theo đuổi, không bị sao nhãng bởi những thứ xung quanh. Khi con người ta không có một cái “sự nghiệp” để theo đuổi thì dễ bị ảnh hưởng bởi đám đông, bởi những cái lặt vặt, luẩn quẩn của cuộc sống. Người ta “tham” bởi vì xung quanh, gia đình, họ hàng, làng xã… ai cũng tham, cái tôi của họ không đủ lớn, niềm kiêu hãnh không có. Người ta luôn nói về đạo đức một cách chung chung, luôn cần noi theo một chuẩn mực nào đó mà quên mất chính mình.

If you want to change people’s minds, you need more than evidence. You need persistence. And empathy. And mostly, you need the resources to keep showing up, peeling off one person after another, surrounding a cultural problem with a cultural solution.

And that post, the post I didn’t write, the post that never saw the light of the day - that’s the best post ever.
I think most dreams work this way.
The thing is, an unwritten post is no post at all. It’s merely a little bit of gossamer on wings of hope. Doesn’t count.
The only good posts are the ones I’ve written.
I think most dreams work this way, too.

They quit a good job, a job that they liked, because other people got a raise.
This is our culture of “getting ahead” talking.
This is the thinking that, “First class isn’t better because of the seats, it’s better because it’s not coach.” (Several airlines have tried to launch all-first-class seating, and all of them have stumbled.)

Confidence is arrogance if the market doesn’t believe the story.

If you aren’t willing to live your values now, when will you start?

If you’re not proud of it, don’t serve it.
If you can’t do a good job, don’t take it on.
If it’s going to distract you from the work that truly matters, pass.
If you don’t know why they want you to do this, ask.
If you need to hide it from your mom, reconsider.
If it benefits you but not the people you care about, decline.
If you’re going along with the crowd, that’s not enough.
If it creates a habit that costs you in the long run, don’t start.
If it doesn’t move you forward, hesitate then walk away.

Why would you want to be a kid? Because everything is taken care of? Because you don’t have to stress about anything? If you can’t deal with stress or responsibility so much so that you’re wishing and dreaming about how you could go back in time, then I feel bad for you, because you’re wasting your time. Life is constantly moving forward and you’re always going to get older and have more responsibility. That’s how it works.

But this line, and his admiration for Cat and Cersei, is also illustrative of how people like Jaime - and there are many like him in Game of Thrones - live their lives and define themselves: by defining a narrow sphere of people they care about, and doing their best for them while disregarding all others. Being a good person, to Jaime, means doing whatever he has to do for the few people he has decided to love - even if that means killing everyone else in the world.

Isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?

Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles towards the goalposts!

In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been pre-selected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.

Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy - not to mention more attractive - than the average person.

Amiability works better than bribery.

Joe Girard is considered the most successful car salesman in the world. His tip for success: “There’s nothing more effective in selling anything than getting the customer to believe, really believe, that you like him and care about him.”

Yes, terrible experiences change us, and sometimes - when they don’t kill us - they make us stronger. But that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about it, and it doesn’t mean that we have to be grateful, and it certainly doesn’t mean we have to accept our place in someone else’s story.

That’s the essence of business - trade one thing for another. We trade our “freedom to do whatever we want” for a salary. We trade our “freedom to party” for the happiness of raising a child… It’s one of those laws of life which we might not entirely like, but cannot escape.

Writing/reading is like visiting another person’s brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.
But with big books, you’re not just visiting the author’s brain, you’re entering into a romantic relationship with it. You’re making out with their brain, enjoying quiet evenings in the park with their brain, staying up late crying and listening to all of the fear and guilt and joy and bliss pour out of their brain. It’s the most severe form of intimacy between two people who have never met and will never meet.

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later.

This memory would be a lot better if you kissed me right now.

The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more?
To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.

And his studies taught him - as all studies must - that history is made by words. The foolish may think of history as a series of battles, but smart people know that it’s what’s said about those battles that really matters. History, as Napoleon said, is a set of lies agreed upon.

Treaties are just words. Oaths are just words. Prophecies and prayers are just words. Whatever acts of honor or treachery, bravery or cowardice, selfishness or sacrifice occur, they will all be crafted and redacted into agreeable and politically expedient stories. And those stories - a set of lies agreed upon - will be repeated as inspiration, as instruction, as example, and used to shape the future.

Potential doesn’t mean a thing. You’ve got to do it.

Find someone with a growth mindset and tell her that she’s terrible at something. She’ll become instantly inquisitive. At no point will she become offended by your criticism, and in fact she’ll probably thank you.
If you do the same thing with someone with a fixed mindset, he’ll get instantly defensive, questioning both the validity of your assessment and the importance of that skill in the first place. You won’t get thanked and you may even get some not-so-constructive criticism in return.

Because I have some good news and bad news for you: there’s very little that’s special about you or your problems.
My recommendation: redefine yourself in mundane and broad ways. Choose to see yourself not as this rising star or unheard genius. Choose to see yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, see yourself as just a few simple things: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
This often means giving up some grandiose and pleasant ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people simply could never imagine.

Making a million dollars can threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money. Becoming a famous rock star can threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success - for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure - it threatens who they are and what they know now.

So much of our culture pressures us to live a life of legend. I’ve felt it myself time and time again. I want to be remembered. But by whom? I think our underlying motivation for our ceaseless work effort is to be remembered for something great, but typically it’s centered on being great to people that we aren’t that close to. In my opinion, what matters in the end is not if we are famous to the world but with our families. I want to be a hero to my family and those closest to me. And I think meal time, in an unexpected philosophical way, takes me back to remembering this simple truth.

Sounds are your brain’s interpretations of vibrations of pressure in a medium (air). Light is your brain’s interpretations of certain wavelengths of radiation striking receptor cells clustered in your eyeballs. There are things you don’t see, don’t hear, and what you do see and hear is your brain’s description of it, not the actual literal thing. You are not ‘directly connected’ to any sense which discerns ‘reality’, all of your senses are interpreted through your brain.
This also leads to the interesting thought problem of the brain in the vat. In short, there isn’t a way to prove you aren’t a brain in a vat and something is simply manipulating the parts of you that discern sensations.

Globalization is amazing in that it’s effectively a symptom of having processes that work well. The problem is that as labor become less value, what are laborers to do?

What does Gordon Ramsay rant about constantly? Consistency. What was the McDonald’s innovation? Operations through Hamburger University.
The story you see over and over in industry is that the ones who get rich are the ones that eliminate the skill, commoditize the product and the employees, take a thin slice of a huge pie, and sell by the boatload.
The consequence then is that a lot of jobs that used to be middle class jobs are not “just scraping by.”

When you hold something small and intricate in you hand, like a Swiss watch that shows the movement in action, you get a sense of awe at how much thought went into the item. Someone thought really hard about a very small area.
When you look at original artwork, or listen to live music, you get a sense of the thoughtfulness and passion that went into it. Unlike the watch, these things do not scale down. MP3s don’t sound great. Prints hide the texture and weight of the colors, and often the size. Some experiences do not virtualized well.

But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate… but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means, “the pain from an old wound”. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again… to a place where we know we are loved.

I was so hard on myself and punished myself with even more work so I could announce my success as soon as possible. That is, until the day I realized no one gave a fuck about me, so why would I?
You are no more than a few seconds of attention other people give to a Facebook status. In 2014, no one has time to are about others in such a crowded, noisy world.

I have a running joke with a friend about how audiophiles, past a certain dollar figure, lose all resemblance of musical taste. I think it’s because it’s about consumption: you need to find the perfect “content” to show off your sound system. I guess that’s the word I hate the most: “content.” It suggests an empty terabyte on your DVD to fill, 40 hours of evening free time to consume, a distribution pipeline to monetize. At some point, do I consume content, or does it consume me? I want inspiration, not a 4K babysitter. My younger self would be jealous of my tech paradise. But I’m a little jealous of his pad of paper, pencil, and scrappy imagination.

I’m not just avoiding creativity, I’m blunting it with the garbage entertainment I consume. A kid can make a feature film with an iPod touch, or learn how to code apps and make a million bucks. But what’s scary is that the options for entertainment on that same iPod touch are just so compelling that… well, why bother? I’m an “adult,” and a “professional,” and I’m ashamed to admit how much time I’ve spent playing Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride for meaningless high scores.

There was something so ethereal about it all, without a trail of digital communication. Without a single photo. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, I can’t say qualitatively that this is a purer form of relationship, or prospective relationship, but I enjoyed the magic of it. And there’s something that makes it more precious, if I’m allowed to use that word, now that it’s over. After all, this was all in my mind from the start. She just wasn’t that into me. And so in my mind it will remain. With this fuzzy version of her face, and some misremembered encounters, and a couple pages of reference notes.

The real education begins after college.

I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. You sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don’t have to invent the wheel every day. Today you’ll do what you did yesterday and tomorrow you’ll do what you did today. Eventually you’ll get somewhere. Every great idea I ever had grew out of work itself. If you’re going to wait around for the clouds to open up and lightning to strike you in the brain you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.

The need to look cool, or the need to stand out. The need to impress your friends, or simply to like how you look. It doesn’t matter that it’s digital, by the way: any one person’s reality is ultimately wherever they choose to focus their attention and time, which makes games like Lol far more real to their inhabitants than the fashion boutiques in Paris would ever be - and far more exclusive. After all, there is only one seller.

Small dreams work this way: figure out what’s available, then choose your favorite. Important dreams are based on what needs to be done, and then… find your how.

I know many of you are rolling your eyes - selling digital clothes for a digital avatar, and to the tune of a billion dollar? How silly must you be? Well, how silly must you be to carry a $5,000 handbag with far less functionality than another a fraction of the price, or wear a $10,000 watch or $200 necktie? What about flying first class or staying in a five-star hotel - you can’t take either with you! It’s completely irrational. Or, rather, it’s irrational if you only look at features. The entire point is how these purchases make you feel, and it’s that feeling, whether it be an appreciation for craftsmanship, status, or simply being pampered, that provides the sort of differentiation that makes all of these products profitable. One could argue that an insistence on limiting the calculation of value to items that are permanent, physical, and easily listed on a spreadsheet is the real irrationality.

Nhớ đến một đoạn trong truyện kiếm hiệp: “Mọi xung đột trên đời đều bắt nguồn từ sự bất đồng quan điểm. Đúng sai trong quan điểm chỉ có lịch sử có thể phán xét. Trung nghĩa chỉ là một loại thủ đoạn. Là những lời hoa mỹ đám văn nhân dành cho đám khờ khạo đi bỏ mạng. Là thủ đoạn hạ lưu của quân chủ để bảo vệ lợi ích riêng mình…

If anything, I began to appreciate even more intently that flow and tranquility were the true source of happiness for me all along. It was like I had pulled back the curtain on that millionaire’s dream and found, to my surprise, that most of the things on the side were things I already had. Equal parts shock and awe, but ultimately deeply reassuring.

Expectations, not outcomes, govern the happiness of your perceived reality.

Science is immortal, but you are not. History is immortal: Earth could be vaporized, and on some unimaginably distant planet on some unimaginably remote future date, another civilization’s historians could still choose to use the terrestrial year as a unit of time measurement. But where does that leave you? You have a life to live here and now. “Tell me,” the poet Mary Oliver asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We never truly know how to reply to that challenge, do we, since more knowledge - the knowledge we do not have - could always justify holding current plans in abeyance just a little longer. But when life refuses to wait any longer and the great game begins whether you have suited up or not, then a demand arises that religion - or some expedient no more fully rational than religion - must meet. You’re going to go with something. Whatever it is, however rigorous it may claim to be as either science or religion, you’re going to know that you have no perfect warrant for it. Yet, whatever you call it, you’re going to go with it anyway, aren’t you? Pluralism at its deepest calls on you to allow others the closure that you yourself cannot avoid. Science keeps revealing how much we don’t, perhaps can’t, know. Yet humans seek closure, which should make religious pluralists of us all.

Physical science has historically progressed not only by finding precise explanations of natural phenomena, but also by discovering what sorts of things can be precisely explained. These may be fewer than we had thought. If science is the pinnacle of human knowing and physics the pinnacle of science, and if physics is deemed crucially limited even by the gifted few - who know it best - where does that leave the rest of us? You may die never having learned the one fact that would have changed everything for you. In just the same way, extinction may befall the human species with key questions still unanswered and perhaps even unasked. And as that moment nears, will science have been superseded by something that differs from it as much as it differs from philosophy or philosophy from religion? When we reflect on how slightly, on the one hand, our genome differs from that of the chimpanzee and how greatly, on the other hand, our knowledge surpasses that of our genetic cousin, can we not imagine that a further minor genetic alteration might bring into existence a being whose knowledge and modes of inquiry dwarf ours as much as ours dwarf those of the chimpanzee?

A universe deaf to his music, as indifferent to his hopes as to his sufferings - or to his crimes.

It’s not about knowing needlessly fancy words (but it’s often hard to know if the fancy word is needless until after you learn it). Your vocabulary reflects the way you think (and vice versa). It’s tempting to read and write at the eighth-grade level, but there’s a lot more leverage when you are able to use the right word in the right moment. A fork in the road for most careers is what we choose to do when we confront a vocabulary (from finance, technology, psychology, literature…) that we don’t understand. We can either demand that people dumb down their discourse (and fall behind) or we can learn the words.
It’s hard to be a doctor or engineer or key grip if you don’t know what the words mean, because learning the words is the same thing as learning the concepts.

An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” But among the dualities that lend love both its electricity and its exasperation - the interplay of thrill and terror, desire and disappointment, longing and anticipatory loss - is also the fact that our pathway to this mutually refining truth must pass through a necessary fiction: We fall in love not just with a person wholly external to us but with a fantasy of how that person can fill what is missing from our interior lives.

All people seem to discuss when talking about being a billionaire are the privileges and the lifestyle and the excess and the fabulousness… but no one talks about the scary part of being a member of a rich family. But when you’re in this position, it’s real. It’s really scary and it’s always in the back of your mind. You’re always afraid of being kidnapped or killed or tortured or whatnot. It’s not paranoia, it’s the truth. It’s possible and it could happen at any time.
Seeing those complex security devices reminds you that you live in danger. It’s this constant reminder that you’re different. It’s something that you have to live with, the idea that there might be people out there who want to hurt you because of how much money your parents have.

You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain. It’s why you see people with four different babydaddies instead of one. You grab a bit of connection wherever you can to survive. You have no idea how strong the pull to feel worthwhile is. It’s more basic than food. You go to these people who make you feel lovely for an hour that one time, and that’s all you get. You’re probably not compatible with them for anything long term, but right this minute they can make you powerful and valuable. It does not matter what will happen in a month. Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

Texting makes flaking out extremely simple.

I didn’t want to be them. I wanted to be a colorful, shinny person with love in my heart. Someone with passion, happiness, laughter lines, someone who has taken life by the horns and lived on the edge, taken risks, had love and loss and seen the world. I can’t afford the Prada suit right now, but I can’t wait to wake up tomorrow… My future is unpredictable (which I love), but I know that it will be fine because I’m the one in control. I spent 23 years developing my brain, and now I’m using it.

Couples move in together not just because it’s economically prudent. They understand, consciously or instinctively, that sustained proximity is the best route to the soul of someone; that unscripted gestures at unexpected junctures yield sweeter rewards than scripted ones on date night; that the “I love you” that counts the most isn’t whispered with great ceremony on a hilltop in Tuscany. No, it slips out casually, spontaneously, in the produce section or over the dishes, amid the drudgery and detritus of their routines. That’s also when the truest confessions are made, when hurt is at its rawest and tenderness at its purest. I know how my 80-year-old father feels about dying, religion and God not because I scheduled a discrete encounter to discuss all of that with him. I know because I happened to be in the passenger seat of his car when such thoughts were on his mind and when, for whatever unforeseeable reason, he felt comfortable articulating them.

Genghis Khan left behind a great set of successors. Your successors are the people who transform your life into a story etched in stone. Temujin’s successors fed off their father’s legend and further strengthened it during their reigns of consolidation. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler committed suicide along with Eva Braun, leaving no one behind to tell his tale. Presto: good guy Khan and the evil Nazi.

Psychologically speaking, we are inherently self-hating. This is a fact. As children, we all internalize our traumas and disappointments and failures to be wholly representative of our own self-worth. And because we all experience trauma, failure and disappointment, we all, to varying degrees, grow up feeling somewhat awful about ourselves. This is not a bug, it’s a feature of human evolution. We are evolved to be miserable and insecure to a certain degree, because it’s the mildly miserable and insecure creature who is going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

As the old saying goes, every joke is only half made in jest.

We’re humans. We all need to buy into belief systems on complete faith. We all need to feel some form of “us vs them” mentality. We all want to believe that eternal happiness, salvation, utopia, enlightenment or whatever can be achieved in our lifetime. And we all have this unnerving feeling that everything we love and appreciate will one day collapse and be taken from us.
As Nietzsche said, “He who has a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘what.’” Like it or not, the majority of human history has operated through a series of cultish forms of organization like this - whether it was an irrational loyalty to a king, a race, a nation or a creed, humans have spent most of history slaughtering each other and subjugating themselves in these kinds of sickening ways. What we see today are merely the echoes of the same bloody song played out throughout the millennia.

When I was very young, I had a recurrent daydream that the whole world was just a show put on for my benefit. That unless I was present to see things, they just ceased to exist.

A recent Quartz article insists that when choosing a life partner, we have to search for the right “eating companion for about 20,000 meals,” “travel companion for about 100 vacations,” “parenting partner” and “career therapist” - all while admitting that contemplating such a project “is like thinking about how huge the universe really is or how terrifying death really is.”

After I read May’s theory that love “is now the West’s undeclared religion,” I began to see evidence of it everywhere. “Where you get down to it… [love is] the only purpose grand enough for a human life,” writes Sue Monk in The Secret Life of Bees. At funerals, we praise the way the deceased person loved as the ultimate sign that his life had meaning. Justince Anthony Kennedy, in his Supreme Court opinion legalizing gay marriage nationally, identified marriage as the ultimate wellsping of all the other essential human joys, from “expression” to “spirituality,” while Sheryl Sandberg counsels young women that their choice of a mate is the most important decision of their lives. According to May, we no longer view love as “the rarest of exceptions,” as older cultures did, “but as a possibility open to practically all who have faith in it.”

Nobody know what “minds” are.

If you hesitate to map out your future, to make a big plan or to set a goal, you’ve just gone ahead and mapped your future anyway.

We don’t become mediocre all at once, and we rarely do it on purpose. Instead, we start believing that the entire project is our job not this one thing, this one thing we used to do so brilliantly.
The day the organization installs the, “your call is very important to us…” message is the day that they announce to themselves who they are becoming. Customers rarely care about your priorities.
Getting bigger is supposed to make us more effective and efficient. Alas, the way to get there isn’t by doing what you used to do, but less well.

Làm được gì? Và đã có gì?
Chỉ học đòi thói chê bai
Đời chưa thấu hết
Thôi hãy kiệm lời.

As little as possible. Or as much. The system might push you to become mediocre, but that very same system rewards excellence. The perception that the minimum is viable is built deep into our notion of productivity, but it turns out that the maximum is valuable indeed.

I define art as having nothing at all to do with painting. Art is a human act, a generous contribution, something that might not work, and it is intended to change the recipient for the better, often causing a connection to happen.

Trying to think. Tough task thinking. Please do not disturb.
Much of the arduous work of technology development involves solitary concentration and happens inside people’s heads. It was not only tough to think, but difficult to get away from the constant interruptions of daily work life that we now call multitasking.

What we most need in our lives, though, is something worth doing, worth it because we care.
There are plenty of forces pushing us not to care. Bosses, systems, bureaucracies and the fear of mattering. None of them are worth sacrificing something as important as caring.

If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Maybe what you want isn’t what you want, you just enjoy wanting. Maybe you don’t actually want it at all.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and the working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play. What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

There’s something funny that happens to me when I write these articles. The more I think about how amazing an article I’m going to write is going to be, the more I procrastinate and the harder it is to write it.
Conversely, when I stop caring whether the article is great or not, the article feels as though it “writes itself” and it usually turns out great.
Chances are you’ve experienced this in some area of your life as well. The more you care about the outcome, the harder it feels to achieve. The less you care, the more naturally it comes to you.
It’s backwards in a way. The more I try to convince myself that I’m a brilliant writer and that I have something important to say, the more the simple act of writing an article threatens my identity, and the more I procrastinate writing it.
Whereas if I just believe that I’m just some random dude who puts words on paper, eventually the act of writing then threatens nothing and procrastination stops.

The biggest cause of excellence is the story we tell ourselves about our work. It’s a choice, a commitment and a lifelong practice.

Redse later married, had two children, and then divorced. Every now and then Jobs would openly pine for her, even after he was happily married. And when he began his battle with cancer, she got in touch again to give support. She became very emotional whenever she recalled their relationship. “Though our values clashed and made it impossible for us to have the relationship we once hoped for,” she told me, “the care and the love I felt for him decades ago has continued.” Similarly, Jobs suddenly started to cry one afternoon as he sat in his living room reminiscing about her. “She was one of the purest people I’ve ever known,” he said, tears rolling down his cheeks. “There was something spiritual about her and spiritual about the connection we had.” He said he always regretted that they could not make it work, and he knew that she had such regrets as well. But it was not meant to be. On that they both agreed.

“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important - creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and human consciousness as much as I could.

For instance, here’s a five minute video of nothing but some of the most amazing feats you can imagine.
The crazy thing is that every single person in this video, for their five seconds of incredible footage, likely spent years and years practicing their craft as well as dozen of hours of recording to just get that perfect five second spot. Yet we are not exposed to those years of practice. Or those hours of drab and failed footage. We’re merely exposed to each person’s absolute finest moment - possibly in their entire lives.
And then we watch this and forget about it within minutes. Because we’re onto the next thing. And then the next.

In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people - or different things to the same person - at various points in our lives.

As with our autonomy obsession, this extreme valuing of attention is a legacy of the Enlightenment: the flip side of Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” is that we are what we think about. The problem with this conception of selfhood is that people don’t spend all their time thinking in an organized, deliberate way. Our minds wander, and life is full of meaningless moments. Whole minutes go by during which you listen to Rihanna in your head, or look idly at people’s shoes, or remember high school. Sometimes, your mind is just a random jumble of images, sensations, sounds, recollections; at other times, you can stare out the window and think about nothing. This kind of distracted time contributes little to the project of coherent selfhood, and can even seem to undermine it. Where are you when you play Temple Run? Who are you when you look at cat GIFs? If you are what you think about, then what are you when your thoughts don’t add up to anything? Getting distracted, from this perspective, is like falling asleep. It’s like hitting pause on selfhood.

So what does that leave us? Only the climb, as Baelish says. Only the struggle. Only the hope for something real and tangible, however transient, to keep us warm in the dark, in the cold, in the emptiness of an indifferent universe.
So what does Ygritte believe in? Only real things: no abstractions, no ideals, no fancy tales or stuffy religions. She believes in herself, and in Jon Snow, and in what they’ve found together in this cold place. She knows he was lying about betraying the Night’s Watch, and she doesn’t care, because that doesn’t matter. “But I’m your woman now, Jon Snow. You’re going to be loyal to your woman.”
“It’s you and me that matters to me and you,” Ygritte tells Jon Snow. In a cold and indifferent universe, that’s not a bad philosophy. If that turns out to be the only moral of this story, I can live with it.

I said last week that GoT was not so much about building a better world as it was about building better people, but in fact I think the real message of this show is that there is no division between the two. As Dany is discovering, you cannot build a more just society by being unjust; you cannot build make people kinder through cruelty; you cannot fight for good by doing evil. The belief that you can is perhaps the determining factor in making someone a villain. This is why I have always hated Melisandre. I’ve had arguments with people about whether her goals are good or evil, but it doesn’t matter. (Very few people think they are evil for the sake of being evil: Ramsay Bolton might, but Roose and Tywin and Walder Frey almost certainly felt everything they did was for the greater good). But Melisandre’s absolute certainty about her cause makes her think that everything she does is good simply because she is the one doing it: the end justifies the any means. That, to me, is practically the definition of evil. (It’s only in fictions - lesser fictions than GoT - that villains are motivated by a desire to end the world. In human history, true evil has been far more likely to emerge from a desire to save the world, or to build a better one).

GoT values nothing more than the individual, I believe, for it is failing to see individuals that leads to inhumanity. Men like Tywin Lannister see human beings as huge, mathematical blocks to be pushed around the board. (“Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner?” He asked Tyrion, rhetorically, when defending the Red Wedding.) As we see elsewhere in this episode, thinking of people in that abstract, objective way may be more practical, but it’s also how evil acts are justified: we can compromise our ideals, in order to achieve a greater good; we can sacrifice one, in order to save many. But the ones matter. In the end, they are all that matter.

A bird in search of a cage.
So much freedom, so much choice, so many opportunities to matter.
And yet, our cultural instinct is to find a place to hold us, a spot where we are safe from the responsibility/obligation/opportunity to choose. Because if we choose, then we are responsible, aren’t we?

Each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you get hits with the arrow. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn’t feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.
This is one of the main problems with organ transplants: the organism protects itself against foreign matter, even if it is a new heart that would keep it alive.

I’m not sure if these children are indeed gifted, if they require all these artificial boost and support.

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sound that say listen to this, this is important.

A city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned, the Doom consumed it all alike, and neither of them turned. It’s a lovely image, and it evokes one the saddest, most profound lessons of GoT: life is ultimately a very small thing that happens on a very small scale. For all the focus on thrones and empires and dynasties, and all the concern about history and legacies and the future of nations, what really matters is just individual experiences, lived moment to moment. The most important event in the history of the world was just background noise to two people in love facing their deaths. In that terrible, historic moment, the only thing that mattered to them was the small comfort and solace they each found in another human being.
The great deeds done, and the mighty battles won, and the greatest empires ever built: these will all eventually become nothing more than forgotten lines in a song, or dull historical entries in some dusty, unread tome. A thousand agonized decisions, a million deeds large and small, a billion moments of a human life on earth, become nothing when viewed from the perspective of history. And yet any one of those tiny moments, when viewed from a human perspective, can be everything that matters.

While it turns out that most people are idiots, the corollary is that sadly that you are one too, and that while we can all bask in the secure knowledge that we’re better than the average person (let’s face it, nobody ever believes that they’re average or below-average), we should also admit that we’re not the sharpest knife around, and there will be other people that are less of an idiot than you are.
Some people react badly to smart people. Others take advantage of them. Make sure that you, as a kernel maintainer, are in the second group.
Suck up to them, because they are the people who will make your job easier. In particular, they’ll be able to make decisions for you, which is what the game is all about. So when you find somebody smarter than you are, just coast along. Your management responsibilities largely become ones of saying “Sounds like a good idea - go wild”, or “That sounds good, but what about xxx?”. The second version in particular is a great way to either learn something new about “xxx” or seem extra managerial by pointing out something the smarter person hadn’t thought about. In either case, you win.

If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible make clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.

Science has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corder of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

What would your advice be for people who are just starting out in this field? Remember that nothing is magic. Even though it seems like you’re woking at the top of a stack of impenetrable abstractions, they’re made by people (who were probably rushed, or drunk, or both). Learn how they work, then figure out how to minimize your dependence on them.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Trapped in a system based on economic rationality, we all want the power to be something bigger than our credit card limit, or our job function. Nobody sits at home watching these dramas imagining they are a mere slave, peasant or serving girl: we are invited to fantasize that we are one of the characters with agency - Daenerys Targaryen, a beautiful woman with tame dragons, or the unkillable stubby hunk that is Jon Snow.

The mass brand leaders in most markets have figured out how to deliver extraordinary promises at scale. Not the high end guys. The mass ones. They do this by realizing that the cost of making the customer happy is tiny compared to the cost of leaving her unhappy.

A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the answer is no, maybe the number has no business of being in the sentence in the first place.

The problem today is in social pressure.
Like the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, or the houses we live in, our photographs are another vehicle to which the world judges us because the world expects to see proof of our beautiful, happy lives and we have grown to crave that attention. In this light, photography has grown vain in its old age.
We shoot, we shoot, and we shoot… and then we share. Sometimes to prove our good taste or creative ability, but also, in many cases, as a means to feel alive because we have generated this need to prove something to other and to ourselves.

Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail.

Don’t solve popular problems, solve well paying ones.

So, what does it feel like to be old?
From time to time something reminds you of the past.
You remember things.
Mostly nice things.
There is a tendency to reminisce, meander, and ramble when talking and writing about the past, and I wonder if anyone is listening, reading, or caring much. But that is not feeling old, it’s more like wondering if there isn’t something better that I could be doing.
There is of course, but I can’t be bothered. That’s it.
When you get old you feel you can’t be bothered because most things don’t matter that much.
Or not as much as they used to.
Or not as much as they ever should have done.
I just wish I had known that then when I was younger.

More mature works, however, recognize that our fears change as we grow older: they recognize that “growing up” is not a solution, but an expansion of problems. They realize that home is a responsibility, not a safe haven. They acknowledge that there’s no such thing as “happily ever after.”
They recognize the sad, uncomfortable truth about what the end of childhood really means. It means we stop being quite so afraid of monsters, and we start being afraid of becoming monsters.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

They’re going to be sad. So am I. We’re enjoying her company while she’s here and then we’re going to miss here. You know, Janet, sometimes people are supposed to be sad. It’s ok. It’s the flip side, and it’s actually good.
Yeah you want your kids to be sad?
No. Well, yes. If it’s cos they love somebody.

And because I didn’t have a phone I couldn’t Instagram a single bit of it. This is probably the point where I should say that I had a far better time because I wasn’t trying to capture everything in a photograph, because I was actually living the moment. But the sorry truth is, I couldn’t enjoy it because it felt like a missed opportunity to record a fabulous day. As much as I’d like to deny it, today, for those of us who spend our days nearly permanently tethered to the digital realm, if it doesn’t pop up on Instagram, it might as well have not happened at all.

One thing that did cut through the exhaustion was a task I’d been anticipating for more than six years: writing the Facebook post in which I announce to friends, former friends, frenemies, ex-girlfriends, college roommates, future wives, and family members that I was not in fact an obscure failure but a new, minor footnote in the annals of Silicon Valley startup successes.
Writing it was easy. I’d had six years to plot it in my head. I kept it simple and tried to strike the right mix between “Aw yeah!” And “Aw shucks!” No one likes a sore winner. I pushed it live and watched as over 500 comments rolled in. Meanwhile my phone buzzed across my desk as it received text messages from people I’d not heard from in years. The middle school crush. The Sunday school teacher. The startup friends from Chicago. At last!

Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them… Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience. The things I’ve written just for myself are no good. They tend to peter out. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

It’s tempting to judge what you read:
I agree with these statements, and I disagree with those. However, a great thinker who has spent decades on an unusual line of thought cannot induce their context into your head in a few pages. It’s almost certainly the case that you don’t fully understand their statements.
Instead, you can say:
I have now learned that there exists a worldview in which all of these statements are consistent.
And if it feels worthwhile, you can make a genuine effort to understand that entire worldview. You don’t have to adopt it. Just make it available to yourself, so you can make connections to it when it’s needed.

But here is some hard truth: none of that matters. Nobody cares how hard you had to work to get from idea to product. All they care about is that you have produced at the end of all that work. What makes it better or worse is how it stacks up relative to the competition - even the competition that is shamelessly riffing off your core ideas - not how much sweat you put into it. You want your communications to speak from the customer’s perspective, not from your own. Customers don’t give you brownie points for how hard you worked on something. All they care about is how to get the best product for the best price.

Questions are good. A legitimate, “why?” is enough to change the world.
But stalling, stalling is the last thing that you need. And why is often the escape hatch for people who know what they should do, but fear doing it. It’s easier to ponder, to question the meaning of this or our role in where we go next.
The best answer for the stalling why is: Go. [and of course, the best response to the impetuous, status-quo driven ‘Go’ is to ask, ‘why?’]

Wait a minute, this can’t be happening to me. I haven’t even begun to live. Where’s all that money that I was supposed to have made? Where are all the good times I was going to have?

I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time. The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be. The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them.

Have you seen this ad? Then it’s for you. Time to learn why they know you better than you know yourself.
The target demo is not the 1%; the target demo is the Aspirational 14%. The know they are supposed to like quality and goodness and etiquette and discretion, but no on ever taught them what those things look like, so when someone does point it out to them they will go all in.
There’s a difference between what the brand is and what the brand says about you. You’ll pay 10x for the former and 100x for the latter.

If a person thinks their safety or the safety of their family is at risk… that plays a big factor when trying to sell them an item.

The thing is, everybody thinks they are impervious to advertising. Everybody thinks they always choose the “cheapest option of greatest quality, based on independent research.” They’re just mostly wrong, is all. They either don’t understand the way their purchasing decisions actually get made, or they choose to tell themselves they are made differently than they are. Which isn’t to say that you’re not the exception, just that generally speaking everybody thinks they’re the exception. So how you think you buy things doesn’t mean much; you’d have to have someone outside your own head looking at your purchasing patterns to know for sure.

I’ve just realized to how much you have to look attractive just to be given a chance at something.

Being wealthy is relatively lonely existence.
The problems you encounter, while very real and very frustrating, will not elicit sympathy from the 99% of the planet.
Like being an exceptionally beautiful woman, most of the people who approach you are only after one thing, and that perspective warps your ability to connect genuinely with others - one of the most quintessential human needs.
Almost everyone wouldn’t mind being a bit more beautiful or a bit more rich, but few can truly appreciate just how alienating it is to have either in such abundant quantity, that they become the object of desire/envy by everyone you meet.

There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!
I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.

Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.

Drawing is the artists most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

But a talk is a poor knowledge-container. It’s opaque. The viewer can’t skim, browse, or get a gist at a glance. Ideas can’t be looked up as needed; they feel fleeting. The medium works well for entertainment - watch and enjoy - but not for a toolbox.

If only I had started a couple of years earlier before all the good software had been created.

And with that, with regards to being happy, it seems the best advice is also the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and step towards it. Dream big and do something. Anything. The simple act of moving at all will change how you feel about the entire process and serve to inspire you further. Let go of the imagined result; it’s not necessary. The fantasy and the dream are merely tools to get you off your ass. It doesn’t matter if they come true or not. Live, man. Just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be.

The answer is the same reason we hold on to any belief: it makes us feel special. If we’re inherently inferior in some way, then we get to permanently play victim, to play martyr, and it imbues our life with a sick noble purpose. If we were to let go of that and accept that we are inherently worthy of life, worthy of all others, then we would lose our right to victimhood, our right to being special, and instead turn into an anonymous nobody, just another face in the crowd.
And so we hold on to our misery and wear it like a badge of honor. Because it’s the only identity we know.

You can’t change people. You can only help them to change themselves. The rationalization that if you could only do that one more thing to get someone to see your way, to see the enlightened path, to see how to stop being such a raging asshole, is usually a product of an unhealthy attachment to someone and/or a boundary issue. All advice and support must be offered up unconditionally, without expectation of any miraculous turnarounds. Love people for the messed up ways that they already are, not how you’d wish them to be.

Such are a very few of the considerations which show that for every type of animal there is an optimum size.
And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution.

You don’t need more time
…you just need to decide.

Most willing to take time to comment are those with something to gain by doing so.

Most people don’t believe they are capable of initiative.
If your project depends on individuals to step up and say, “This is what I believe, here is my plan, here is my original thought, here is my tribe,” then you need to expect that most people will set that offer and decline to take it.
I don’t think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it. We’ve only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it. There’s a huge shortage… a shortage of people who will say go.

… although who doesn’t like seeing their friends fail now and then?

You know what I learnt losing that duel? I learnt that I’ll never win. Not that way. That’s their game, their rules. I’m not going to fight them: I’m going to fuck them. That’s what I know, that’s what I am, and only by admitting what we are can we get what we want.

Let them hate, so long as they fear.

Traders exist to trade. Mismatch between perceived value and price creates profit. If there is no mismatch, they create some. The press exists to sell newspapers. Controversy creates profit. If there is no controversy, they create some.

Nhưng bổn toạ vẫn luôn tâm tưởng sâu sắc rằng “căn cơ” của “quyền lực” nằm ở “thực lực”.

Maybe to get good at math (and programming) you actually need to put in the work, and true learning is born from the effort and confusion you go through before enlightenment.

Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less. A shadow on the wall, yet shadow can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.

I was forced to abandon the optimism of everyday life. I gave up television and the daily papers. I took time off work. I became obsessed by millennial disasters: the risks of earthquakes, floods and avian flus. I felt the transience of everything, the illusions upon which civilizations are built. I saw in happiness a violent denial of reality. I looked commuters in the face and wondered why they were unbothered by their own meaninglessness.

That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality - it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this si the only life that one is ever likely to live. If commitment is seen as a group of eggs, then to commit oneself to the present is to risk putting all one’s eggs in the present basket, rather than distributing them between the baskets of past and future.

There’s a disconnect between what people want, what they want to want, and what they say they want.

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

We all believe our flag the most beautiful; this tell us something about logos. Should a logo be self-explanatory? It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning. It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes.

Some of the biggest services in the world started off with really simple problems.

Alone in the woods, I experienced the joy of solitude. And I made sure everyone else knew about it.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

Launch is an exciting milestone, but it’s just that: it’s a milestone before a whole new series of work begins.

I can’t get over the profound sense of waste when I do something and think “50,000 devs have probably done this before, and 100,000 more will do it again”… and yet it’s the same shitty thing and it could easily be some open lib.
Every single one of us is standing on the shoulders’ of every dev that preceded us, the least we can do is to help the next generation stand on our shoulders’s too.

But when the connection bleeds over to the remainder of my day, when I’m checking Twitter, email, or RSS as I’m “caring for” my children, the enjoyment of my work lessens. It’s cheapened. Why? In large part, it’s the lack of contrast. Do something all day, every day and your passion will wane. It’s the time away and the alternate experiences that sharpen the senses and heighten the thrill of getting back to what you love.

Technology keeps on advancing so there are opportunities but the thing makes it possible is that human mind settles in fixed ways of looking at the world. Without death there would be very little progress and so one of the things that happen in organizations as well as in people is they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with those and the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises but these people who settle in don’t see it and that’s what gives startup companies their greatest advantages.

You don’t have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don’t want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

There’s only one thing you need to do, ‘feel damn good about yourself, the way you look, your voice, your conversation, your emotional state, enjoy every single bit of it’, by Newton’s third law, action-reaction, people will respond well to you.

Leaders need to be respected, not loved.

Understanding what people really want to know - and how that differs from what you want to tell them - is a fundamental tenet of sales. And you can’t get good at making money unless you get good at selling.

Coolness often means not using the stuff your father uses.
Coolness often is a kind of a rebel statement. Coolness is associated with hip & youth. Coolness means supporting an upcoming product that stands against a big corp. That means it is very, very hard for any big corp to be cool.
Coolness is also about a human story and a human connect. When a company is personified by a leader we admire, we form bonds with the company.

If you end up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

My life is easier to manage if I assume that almost everyone has done things that are illegal and have done things that are morally wrong, even shameful. This includes me, despite my having been blessed by having good intelligence, good health, good education, loving parents, etc. etc. So, for me what is convenient is to assume that “but for the grace of God, there go I.” I am not morally superior to my client. We are both flawed human beings. He needs my help and it’s my job to help him in this one context.

Most of us would be embarrassed to add up the total hours we’ve spent on our jobs and then compare that number with the hours we’ve given to other priorities that we claim are more important, like our families; the figures would show that work is our real priority. Yet after all those hours and all those years, most people are just okay at what they do.

Listen, you’ve been a fine father. But nobody needs a father that much. The girls need a role model. They need to see you live, and succeed.

Just about every great, brave or beautiful thing in our culture was created by someone who didn’t do it for money. We see the local volunteer putting in insane hours even though no one is watching. We hear the magical song or read the amazing poem that no one got paid to write.
Remove money from the story and we’re in a whole new category. The most vivid way to think about this is the difference between a mutually-agreed upon romantic date and one in which money changes hands.

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.

Aim to cripple, not kill. Your goal is to damage your competitors to the point they can’t threaten your survival, but they are still somewhat viable. Remember, dying competitors file antitrust suits; weak competitors are just whiners.

Thinking of us as somebody with a guaranteed future, that underestimates what this business is all about, and the rule that allows us to be successful is that we don’t take anything for granted, we don’t assume that we’re in a strong position, we’re just trying to improve what we’re doing.

Sometimes you just have to look at yourself and go, you know, it’s just not really great, it’s OK, it’s good, but let’s not fool ourselves and call it great.

Critique, really, is best done in person and from people you trust.
Peers are good to hear from but if you all have about the same experience level there won’t be much wisdom injected into the critique. Wisdom comes from experience. You’d be best served by someone with more experience and wisdom than you.

Tuổi trẻ của chúng tôi thì mang cả xương máu của mình ra để mà giành lại đất nước, cho tới giờ tôi vẫn tự hào là tôi sống đẹp.

To limit freedom is to think too much too highly of the status quo.

The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.

While we may judge ourselves by our motivations, we tend to judge others by their actions.

The perception of the incoming disruptors is that they are low quality, and therefore not really worth paying attention to.

30 years of friendship, of fighting together ended after one, justifiable, act of betrayal.

It’s the boredom and lack of stimulation that drives me to do things I really care about, like writing and spending time with others.

You need determination and you need to take losses in your heart. You have to care. I care.
When I lose, I care about put so much time into it that if I lose, it’s really disappointing. When I come home I ask, ‘Why did I lose?’ I watch the video of the game over and over again and I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve identified why I lost. Then I tell myself, ‘Next time I’m going to win.’

But too often in the race to compete, we learn to confuse what is hard with what is valuable. Intense competition makes things hard because you just beat heads with other people. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value. But value is a different question entirely. And to the extent it’s not there, you’re competing just for the sake of competition. Henry Kissinger’s anti-academic line aptly describes the conflation of difficulty and value: in academia at least, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.

If the world is truly flat, it’s just crazed competition. The connotations are negative and you can frame it as a race to the bottom; you should take a pay cut because people in China are getting paid less than you. But what if the world isn’t just crazed competition? What if much of the world is unique?

Computer programmers can make truckload of money the same way that everyone else can: by seeking it. If your professional goals are aligned with making money, then your chances of making a lot of money go way up. Top lawyers aren’t paid the most because they know the law best; that’s ancillary. They’re paid big bucks because they win money for their clients, prevent their clients from losing money and build networks to people that have money to give them. Likewise, programmers who define their goals economically (which broadly includes creating value for users) have nearly unparalleled earning potential.

If you’re only doing a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail. If you’re in grad school and your startup fails, you can say later “Oh yeah, we had this startup on the side when I was in grad school, but it didn’t go anywhere.” You can’t use euphemisms like “didn’t go anywhere” for something that’s your only occupation. People won’t let you.

Nothing can substitute for a handshake and lunch. Sorry, the internet will not solidify what on CEO friend of mine calls “trust equity”. The most important glue in relationships is trust. As an engineer, department manager and program manager with four decades in the trenches, I speak from experience. Ethical values, integrity, genuine caring for your team, personal sacrifice, trust in the relationships you have developed are what really hold a team together, and for most technologies it is about the team. Yes, I agree, “cultural” values keep the team harmonious. Love of innovation and nthe personal passion to be in the game, that’s what keeps us all going, sacrificing.

The iPhone is an amazing device. But it’s not the only amazing device, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world where it is.
Let’s not let our preferences dictate how we think about and relate ot other people. Not seeing it is not the issue - the issue is not being able to see it any other way.

I have another theory, too: When software companies get to a certain size, they start taking their users for granted. They start treating their users as pawns in a battle against some other company. Faceless millions.

Ta giết người thì bọn họ gọi là “Bất khốc thần sầu”, đến khi ta cứu người thì bọn họ lại xưng ta là “Võ lâm thần thoại”.
Ta vốn là một con người thích sao làm vậy, không hề sợ cái thứ hư danh đó liên luỵ đâu.

I took me another fifteen years to realize that the principle of Fire and Motion is how you get things done in life. You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side. Watch out when your competition fires at you. Do they just want to force you to keep busy reacting to their volleys, so you can’t move forward?

They have no feelings in their hearts to help the customers.

“Someone on my computer must miss me,” it seems to say. It’s a combination of a fear of missing out, and a hope of being missed.

Too much swearing is a sign of lesser intelligence.

1. Respect your users
2. Respect their time
3. Respect that they are different from you

Facts do not matter to some people, and you have to find a way to connect with people in a human and personal way before they can start hearing you. The only productive discussions are the ones where both people can see each other as human beings with morals and values and stuff. When people of faith an people of no faith realize that, then everybody comes away with at least a less bad taste in their mouth.

I’m not saying that white people are better, I’m saying being white is clearly better.

The best advice I can give to anyone who doesn’t know a subject is just to start reading. At first you won’t understand fuckall, but after a few months things will start to snap together in your head. I know it’s hard considering most of us have this idea that to learn a subject we need to start at some sort of beginning but in reality there’s no beginning or end of any subject. So just dive in and keep reading until it makes sense.

I think that now you and your friends have a bigger mission than just making cool apps. Think about it. Love, mom.

All software lives within an environment, rich with evidence of context. Using software that doesn’t look outside itself is like conversing with a blind person - constantly describing what is plainly visible.

For the first time in history, you have a global market of 1+ billion people, all connected over an interactive network where they’re all a click away from you. And 100 million new people are being added to that count every year, and that will continue for the next 30 years.

In a startup it is very easy for the code to not get written, for the user interfaces to not get designed… for the people to not come into work… and for the wastebaskets to not get emptied.

In high school, we tend to have high hopes and ambitions. Too often, college beats them out of us. People are told that they’re small fish in a big ocean. Refusal to recognize that is a sign of immaturity. Accepting the truth about your world - that it is big and you are just a speck in it - is seen as wise.

Another trick that smart law students understand is to underline key phrases. Professors never actually fully read exams or bluebooks. And there are only 10-15 important concepts in any given question on the paper, the professor sees them. The professor probably won’t even take the time to see if you correctly embedded those concepts. You’ve made grading easy, and you get an A.

People love a powerful person who’s willing to admit being wrong. It makes you look humble.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

…you have to able to endure a million dollar’s worth of pain.

I’ve had that ‘I do all the work and he gets all the credit’ feeling, only to realize that the difference as that I had taken a job rather than starting a business. Code is just a means to an end. Sure, architecture and good code are important, but they’re important so that users don’t have to care what’s making it work. When I walk into a store, my life is in the hands of the architects and laborers who built the structure; and having worked in construction, I can tell you that they did a hell of a lot of hard work. However, that’s incidental to my purpose in entering the store, and I don’t hold it against the store owner that he didn’t personally build any of the structure his business operates in.

Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
Of course, all of this advice is pointless. If you liked learning to write software with this book, you should try to use it to improve your life any way you can. Go out and explore this weird wonderful new intellectual pursuit that barely anyone in the last 50 years has been able to explore. Might as well enjoy it while you can.

The bottom line is the world doesn’t really care. What the world cares is what we produce. We’ve been a startup for 6 months, we’ve been spending money like we’ve been a startup for 6 months. And in some areas we’ve really produced a lot. We’ve got a lot to show for 6 months since summer. In other areas we don’t have a lot to show for 6 months. So I hope throughout this retreat we tend to make sure that our feet are on the ground and we realize that we’re gonna be judged like every other startups from here on now and that is by what our product is and how timely we bring it to the market.

A lot of CS majors don’t know how to code for their life. A lot of MBAs will stab you in the back over equity. A lot of designers in a post Jobs-ian world are self-entitled brats. It turns out that a lot of people are incompetent and their occupation has nothing to do with it.

I have to admit it’s one of those things the old tell the young, but don’t expect them to listen to. We say this sort of thing mainly so we can claim we warned you. So don’t say we didn’t warn you.

So why were we afraid? We felt we were good at programming, but we lacked confidence in our ability to do a mysterious, undifferentiated thing we called “business.” In fact there is no such things as “business.” There’s selling, promotion, figuring out what people want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, and so on. And the combination is not as hard as it seems, because some tasks (like raising money and getting incorporated) are an O(1) pain in the ass, whether you’re big or small, and others (like selling and promotion) depend more on energy and imagination than any kind of special training.

You know more than most. You’re smart like hell. Yet you haven’t achieved anything significant in your life.

We mistake dumb luck for a machine that produces success. We rely on induction when we should rely on deduction, and then, having realized our mistake, we lean on “data-driven decisions” in lieu of common sense. We chase patterns that aren’t there and miss eager markets right in front of us. All this while projecting the confidence, real or manufactured, that’s necessary to play the game.

You’re born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts.

One of the quiet perils of living in an always-on society is the need to stay connected. In part, we’re driven by relevance or the fear of irrelevance. If we are always part of the conversation, we remain top of mind. Additionally, we’re driven by a sense of vanity. We need to see that, if anything, people are saying about us, how they’re reacting to our engagement, and who others are talking about or to whom they’re connecting.

People get educated, the bright ones rise, they marry equally well-educated spouses. The result is that their children are smarter than those who are gardeners. Not that all children of gardeners are duds. Occasionally 2 grey horses produce a white horse but very few. If you have 2 white horses, the chances that you breed white horses. It’s seldom spoken publicly because those who are not white horses say, “You’re degrading me”. But it’s a fact of life. You get a good mare, you don’t want a dud stallion to breed with your good mare. You get a poor foal. Your mental capacity and your EQ and the rest of you, 70 to 80% is genetic.

We learn as children that persuasive writing is weakened by statements such as “I believe”, “in my opinion”, or “in my limited experience”. (I believe that) it is true that such statements weaken writing, and that it should be the reader’s job to determine which content is editorial and subconsciously insert the “in my opinion”s where appropriate.

Others’ failures are just that: others’ failures. It has nothing to do with you.

Even when you’re actively working on a program it can take half an hour to load into your head when you start work each day. And that’s in the best case. Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this mode. Or to put it more dramatically, ordinary programmers working in a typical office conditions never really understand the problems they’re solving.

The maximum sharing volume likely comes with a friend count of between 3 and 5. As you hit 15, 40, or 100, you’ll censor yourself more, and find less reason to use Path in addition to other services. That means you have to undertake the socially awkward experience of rejecting requests from your co-workers, acquaintances, and fellow early adopters, and make sure not to put them in the same position. You may have already let some loose acquaintances into your inner circle or have outstanding requests from Path 1, and will need to go in and remove them.

I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his integrity I cannot trust.

I’m wasting away my one and only youth. I ought to be out doing fun things and active things, the kind of things I won’t be able to do when my mind and body finally decay. But instead I’m stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds. How did that happen? That freaks me out. This job is destroying my body. This can’t be worth it.

Make money. Fuck sluts. Learn Objective-C.

Have you ever tried multiplying roman numerals? There was nothing difficult about the concept of multiplication - the problem was that numbers, at the time, had a bad user interface.

That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect of my students.
Gradually, I show the students that they have a right to ask this of themselves, and must ask this of themselves. Once that level of standard is in their minds, they will be able to figure out, for themselves, how to do better, how to make something that is as profound as that.

That’s an awkward feeling - not necessarily because they’re more successful at a younger age, but because you know that you’ll never be able to successful in such a way. It’s off the table (even if it was never really on the table to begin with). I watch them I still have a hard time believing they’re younger than me.

Only boring people are bored.

“I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.”

Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

Fix more, whine less.

I went on to college, and grad school, and an engineering career, and I must have solved, what, hundreds of differential equations? Thousands? Obviously I understood the formal relationship between differential equations and integration. But I don’t know that I ever felt it.

Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you.

The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness - the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.

We only get to play this game one time. One life.

But they weren’t there in 2009 when you were up late nights shitting yourself whether you really were smart for pursuing this idea.

Power is like being a lady - if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.

We’ll conquer the world. And we are.

Taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.

It is like the senior year of college. Enjoy it while it lasts, but know that once it’s over, it’s over. There’s no going back.

It is best that ones run away from this table-look-up mentality, where one tries to reduce everything to pattern matching from a table.
The point is that not everything can be converted into a table!
If it can, I may as well just give everyone a table.